The present application relates to diagnosis and service of computer faults.
In recent decades, computers have become integral tools for information processing. Businesses and individuals rely on commercially available PCs for many purposes. To be competitive, companies provide extensive customer support for the machines they sell and expend considerable resources on diagnosis and repair of computers.
A large number of service calls deal with problems created by recent changes in software and hardware configurations on the computer. Identifying recent configuration changes helps diagnose computer faults. Many different problems can arise during the use of computer software and hardware, so customer service needs detailed information about the specific hardware and operating system configurations from the computer to resolve problems.
Service personnel can gather the information they need by going to the actual site of the computer. This is expensive and usually not cost effective. More often, service personnel gather the information they need directly from the customer over the telephone. This solution is not ideal, because problems with the operation of computers may often be complex, and users do not always know what information service personnel need to resolve the service call.
This problem can be partially addressed by installing a diagnostics program on the customer""s computer (e.g., Compaq Diagnostics for Windows) that locally collects hardware and operating system information from the computer. The customer verbally provides this information to customer service during a service call.
The information yielded by diagnostics programs does not identify recent configuration changes in the hardware and software. Since recent configuration changes are often the source of a computer problem, there is need for a way to generate comprehensive configuration snapshots which identify configuration changes for service personnel to use during a service call.
The present application teaches, among many things, an improved method of servicing and diagnosing computers. Computer service tools require on-line functionality to identify and resolve problems without taking the computer off-line, and a simple collection process for gathering the computer information required to effectively resolve service cases. This invention provides a simplified process of capturing comprehensive information about the computer hardware and operating system and compares previous configurations with current configurations to help identify recent changes.
A diagnostics program captures hardware and operating system configurations when the program is installed on the computer. Later, when a computer owner calls customer service with a problem, the computer owner runs the diagnostic program, which captures the current hardware and operating system configurations. The program performs this capture without the need to restart the computer or take it off-line. The original configuration settings (captured when the program was installed) serve as a baseline for comparison to the current configuration. The program output highlights any significant changes that have occurred in the configurations and automatically updates the output file to reflect the latest configuration and differences relative to the baseline. Once this information is gathered, customer service uses it to assist in servicing the customer""s computer.
By automatically performing on-line hardware and operating system information capture and displaying differences between base line and current configurations, the invention provides many advantages. It allows faster problem resolution time, since essential data is gathered and output in a format that highlights the most likely problem spots. This reduces administration costs and resource expenditure in customer service and diagnostics, while maintaining or improving quality of service to the customer. Computer downtime for the customer is also reduced since service calls are resolved more quickly.